Making Out - Cissy

I made out with Cat Stevens every day when I was fourteen. His eyes and mouth were two inches above my face. My back rested deep into the bedroom carpet. His words licked the air around my being.

Repeatedly, his lyrics wrapped their way around my organs penetrating every cell. The rhythmic percussion shook the floor. I was prone, in missionary style, yes, but never passive.

I made the first move each time. I lifted him from a pile on my shelf, opened the heavy wooden lid of an enormous brown stereo. Manipulating the fuzzy-fingered arm of the record player onto vinyl I made a mute circle turn poet.

I watched him spin naked in my bedroom before getting horizontal. I held the album close, outlined his lips and eyes with my index finger. The white paper of his sleeve undone, on the floor, was evidence of his bearing all.

I knew I understand the confused painter mixing hope and despair into the color of song. It was me who could see the cob webs being dusted clean by his words.

I was fourteen, a too-big girl crushing skinny boys behind the hills where we rolled. I went home with grass stains and the frustration of policing own sexuality. I punished curious hands without cuffs but with get-off warnings.

With music I could go all the way. Music taught me how that stranger Art could reach in deep, pull out an urge to hum and fill the air with a perfumed embrace affirming my need to seek, soar and explore.

I was loyal to music but not to Cat. I loved Tom Petty, Bob Seger and Dylan. These men taught me to listen to be still, to be filled from the base of my being. Oh, and the woman too. I was a bisexual listener loving Pat Benatar, Blondie and Bonnie Raitt.

They brought me to my feet and spooned me with strength, anger and tenderness.

I pretended I was a jean-wearing, guitar-playing, hair-tossing screamer. I mocked kicking the air, storming the stage and then sitting, singing acappella on a stool.

In real life, I was a silent lip biter afraid of the bullies in my life. Instead, I raged at the innocent world.  In real life I was terrified of penetration even if it was consensual skin on skin sex.

Reason was no match for fear. Sex seemed capable of killing, cutting me open, gutting my core. I feared my heart would get punctured by a penis and the internal bleeding, invisible, would drain me of my passion, blood and breathe.

I stayed with the safe sex of song. I had a mantle of lovers who needed no display. They sat on a shelf, un-jealous, next to one another until I peeled off their covers.

They knew how to wrap lips around syllables, the turn on of the tongue and how to suck my soul but leave it flavored. That fourteen year old soaked in their moist mouths.

At forty-one, I emerge. I stop to start and hear again a hint of the old hum. Now, I have less need to memorize their lines. I rely on silence, sink into the movements and wait for the music of my own song.

Cissy’s blog: www.seaglassgirl.wordpress.com

Making Out - Terrie - Group 1

“So how you makin’ out?” the guys at Sundown West would ask awkwardly.  I’d been coming to the bar almost every night since my mother killed herself, given to raging revelry or wordless drinking in a corner with my journal. 

Kind-hearted men with soft southern drawls, they were concerned about me, and asked me this question each time I came in.  Every time they did, my brain did a sickening click, and the silent film inside my head would start.   I’m standing in my parents’ house on the day my mother killed herself.

 

Sometime in the middle of the night, she took a 20.20 shotgun and blew her brains out.  I have insisted on coming into the house alone.  I need to see things by myself.  I am cold. I am calm. I am watching from a distance.   

I gaze at the living room as I enter and marvel that most of it appears so normal.  Then I notice that every picture is missing.  Family portraits, dances and recitals, school photos – where are they?   Looking around, I see that they have all been placed neatly, upside down, in a pile under the piano bench.  (Why upside down?  Couldn’t she bear to see our faces?)   

Nothing else seems out of place out here, so I walk in stony surreal steps to the master bedroom.  The mattress and bedding have been removed.  The walls have been scrubbed.  But I don’t need to see it to imagine what it looked like.  When my father called me at 5:30 that morning, his voice was so high-pitched and hysterical that I thought it was a woman’s until I made out his words.

“Terrie!  Mommy’s dead! She’s shot herself!  God, oh God it’s everywhere it’s everywhere…” and then a babbling wailing sound so unlike my military father’s commanding voice.

So here I am, nine hours later, after a leaden flight from Louisiana, during which someone next to me was playing the soundtrack to “The Big Chill” and I began to giggle.  “It’s a movie about a suicide, see?” I thought of telling the innocent passenger as laughter bubbled crazily out of me then evaporated into something dead.

  

I am still dead now as I look around the antiseptic room, but suddenly my heart begins to pump wildly and I need to feel my mother, need to know she was here, need to smell her.  I turn blindly to the dresser and grab the bottle of Magie Noire, her favorite perfume.  I spray it and smell my mother, smell the black magic she had hoped would lure my father back to her.  I throw my head back to howl, but no sound comes out.  Instead I gaze at a crumbled break in the plaster ceiling, and all around it a reddish-brown substance, clumps and ridges splattered like finger paint into a topographic map, a modern landscape.

 

Above my head it is transparent like watercolor, but right over the bed frame it is thick and textured, like oil pastels.  I stand in numb fascination, gazing up at the bits of flesh and blood, the life tissue of my mother, fragments of her brain, her knowledge, her fury, her pain.

My mother. 

Vivian.  Vivacious one, who taught me to be strong. 

I take the perfume and leave.

Tiny Little Murders

Apologies from Cissy for not posting this earlier!

  

We kill fish in my family. Tiny little goldfish. They come into our house to die, and in some reverse alchemy, from from gold into rubbery slices of sushi that have to be flushed.

All the fish that came into our house when we were little died.  There were many and they were free. In the 60’s, in hopes of selling $2.99 fishbowls and 29 cent fish food forever, the Village Pet Shop gave each kid under the age of 12  a sandwich baggie of two free goldfish on Town Day. There were six kids in our family. We wanted our fish.  

Oh, the flurry of finding fish bowls! My mother refused to buy new ones.  Vases, aluminum pots, jelly jars—all were pressed into service.  Fish containers lined the kitchen counters.  We’d stare at the swimming fish, marveling as they chased each other or came to the surface to breathe.

We spent hours naming and re-naming them.  Only some fish names remain in memory—“Snow White” for an albino gold fish; “Fred Fish-Stone,” and “Barney Bubble;” “General” and “Captain” in honor of my uncle who was serving in Vietnam.

Feeding was the most fun.  A little salt shaker of smelly flakes would be sprinkled on the top of the water like a spice, and the fish would rise to mouth it. Over-feeding kills gold fish.  There were six of us, so our fish were fed six times a day.  Positive that we had “forgotten” to feed them, we’d then feed them again.

Dish detergent kills fish.   All our hand-washed bowls, vases, and jelly jars had a film of dish detergent.  Aluminum pots?  Poor goldfish.   Fish need one gallon of water per inch.  No way did we have 12 gallons of water, so the fish died one by one until one or two of the smallest remained in a fish bowl–which we rarely cleaned, which started to smell like fish, with strands of fish poop floating in it along with Snow White.   

After a few months, those fish died, too, and the bowl was stored high in a closet until the next Town Day.   

My grandfather and ancestors fished the Grand Banks off Newfoundland for generations — killing fish to feed their families — and we killed fish, too.  All our fish from the 60’s died.  None are memorialized except here.  I write for all who gave their little finny lives to die as our toys.  In my family we were not even allowed to have funerals for them because we were Catholic and a mock funeral would mock the Funeral Mass.  So we had to flush and stare and hope they were secretly alive, swimming to the sea.   

And was that the worst?  Now when I think of it, it must have been coming home from that store in a clear plastic baggie.  What terror!  Of all the images in this piece, that reminds me of my life the most, and it took me all these words to get here.

Devorah Medwin – Group 1 – Tiny Murders

 

How much does it cost, really, to tear off little pieces of your soul and give them away – consciously, knowingly, passively? It costs everything as I have come to find out. And the wounds do not heal but form scar tissue or scab or ache randomly like a phantom limb. You cannot fool your sense of right – your sense of just or fairness. I think no one really lies to themselves well – only we find corners to stuff things away – nooks and crannies in our throat and heart to bury what we cannot face head on. But there it is, awakened easily at the sight of the person, the sound of their name or just the memory of a time we said yes when we meant to say no or the time when we said nothing at all, even though we knew exactly what to say.

  

It has been a year since my friend offered to split the cost of a plane ticket so we could be together for Passover. It has also been a year that I have said nothing about the money I never received. Every time I think I am ready to say something my heart pounds louder than my resolve and I find a way to justify my friend’s omission. I am sure that it was an oversight. I am sure that she would feel horrible and scold me for taking so long to remind her. And I am also sure that the $100 dollars doesn’t mean nearly as much to her as it does to me. But I am as sure that she offered when I said I couldn’t and she said no problem when I said she shouldn’t and she knows, or I imagine she does, how hard it is to accept money and then how much harder to have to ask again. But instead of holding her to her end of the bargain, instead of risking her feeling bad, I say nothing while I slowly tear off another piece of my soul. I say nothing as the days pass and the wound grows over bumpy and unclean. I say nothing as another tiny murder reveals itself and I say nothing as I see myself repeat it again and again. Stuck always between the words that float around in my head and the ones that actually make it out of my mouth. Stuck between the impossibility of taking care of you while simultaneously taking care of me. Stuck between the idea that somehow it is more acceptable for me to tear off tiny pieces of my soul than to risk asking you to make tiny stretch marks in yours.

 

Judith Hannan - Group 3 - Tiny Murders

When I was 12 years old, I found a baby blue on my grandfather’s driveway.        

“Mama, can I keep him?”

“Yes, but he’s your responsibility,” my mother said.

     

I made him a nest and each morning, I got up 15 minutes before sunrise to begin the every half-hour feedings of milk, water, bits of hamburger meat and the occasional worm from our lawn.

    

 Feival, as I named him, soon perched on my shoulder and I would take him around the neighborhood.  One day, he fell and broke his wing.

    

My mother drove me and Feival to the Audubon Society where a whole room was filled with injured birds.

    

 “They rarely heal,” a volunteer informed me.  “Usually, they die.”

  

 I cried all the way home; no presence on my shoulder to comfort me.

                                                *****************

    

 When my daughter, Frannie, was five, I began to tell her stories about Feival.   How I once left Feival alone in a tree to be a “real” bird and he was attacked by some robins.  How hard it was to disentangle a carelessly dropped worm from bird feathers.  How Feival made me the focus of attention.    

   

I never told her about the broken wing, though.  I said Feival needed to learn to fly and they could teach him to do that at the Audubon Society.  I imagined Feival circling my home, watching over me. I was proud of my little fantasy, of opening a door to magical thinking.

                                                ****************

    

 Frannie is seven when she finds a fledgling on a driveway in Martha’s Vineyard. 

“Mama, can we take him home?”

     

“I don’t know Frannie, raising a baby bird is hard.”

    

“But he’s going to die,” she cries.

     

I lapse into Platitudes as a Second Language.  He’s not a newborn anymore.  His mother’s probably right nearby.  This is how nature works; you can’t fix everything.

    

But Frannie doesn’t want to fix everything, just herFeival.  I relent a little. “I’ll call the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary and see if they’ll take him.”

    

“Can I hold him in the car?” Frannie asks.

    

 “Maybe he’d feel calmer in a box. That’s if they take him.”

    

“Will he still be there next year when we come back?”

    

“I doubt it.  Usually they try to set them free.”  Give me points for not saying that most of them die.

    

“Yeah, but if he is still there, can I go see him?” Frannie continues.

    

 “Of course, but remember, they may not take him.”

    

“If they set him free and he flies over me will he come see me because he remembers my smell?”

    

“I don’t know if birds smell that well from so high up.” 

    

“Don’t they sometimes hop on the ground?”

    

Frannie’s fantasy is on life support as I call Felix Neck.  “No, we don’t take baby birds.”

    

 I tell Frannie and then confess the truth about Feival, thinking she will understand the futility of trying to raise a baby bird.  But how could she. Frannie doesn’t know that I never believed in magic.  I invited her to live in a world of fantasy so I could join her there.  When I couldn’t, I had to take it away from her.

                                                *****************

    

Frannie is 19 now.  Recently, she was asked what skill she wished she had.  She didn’t hesitate.  “I want to fly.” Feival still lives, only now he soars in the open sky of Frannie’s soul. 

      

Stal Herz - Group 2 - Tiny Muders

  

Standing in line outside theFoodMart on 145^th and St. Nicholas Ave., just before it turns into St. Nicholas Place, most of the people were wrapped in whatever would keep them warm, looking over their charts and checking lottery numbers.

 

Faces turn even heavier when numbers don’t match.

 

At the end of the line, a woman carrying work shoes over her heavily padded shoulder twisted the tip of her worn in sneakers on the trafficked floor and scanned the newspaper for names but could find only tiny murders.

  

These were noted in the section of the paper that kept up the statistics of the number of dead in the war. 

  

We are at war.

 

Moving past the line of those who still were scratching off fields and looking for magic digits, she filled her cart with what would have been enough for her family before the recruitment officer came by the high school with an empty sheet that needed to be filled.

  

Now it was out of habit that she shopped for the same amount. She didn’t carry a cell phone so not to receive the news in the middle of the day, so she would check the papers and see how much the numbers had gone up that day and figure out the probability of a phone call waiting for her. 

  

Did they send telegrams anymore? 

 

The front pages were filled with football scores and politicians smiling because they were closer to being in control.

  

Smiles.

 

She stopped at the laundry mat on the top of 155^th, the last street before the McCombs Bridge and looked out across the Harlem river at the construction of the new Yankee Stadium, which can be seen if you lean just a little to the left because the housing project is blocking the view of the flag pole that was just put in place.  Her son used to stand at the top of this block when the sun went down over both boroughs and dream of playing opening day at the old stadium.

  

His dreams were of baseball back them.

    

The letters from him talked of everything other than what was happening to him - same as the newspapers and television programs. At home, writers were on strike because they wanted more money from their fiction while young men who would become the subject of stories were laying down their lives for – Can you tell me what for?

  

The murders are tiny, added up and stacked upon each other until one day they will form a monument to mourn in front of. But that is a long way to walk for this woman, who spends most of her time on this block carrying groceries up to her family that had one less at the table, so those part of smaller circles could have more food on theirs.

Where is she in acceptance speeches?

 

Christelle – Group 2 – Tiny Murders

  

On a road trip last summer, my boyfriend and I became murderers of the tiny-brained. Our victim was a wild turkey on the highway on our way out of Nashville, Tennessee.

   

We were speeding along in the fast lane, the tires of our Volkswagen Passat purring along the ground. A group of turkeys on the side of the road stretched out their necks at us. One decided to take flight.

   

I watched his underbelly, the soft undersides of his wings as he spread them and came directly at our windshield. I prayed that he would clear it, and he did. But the heavy, clumsy fowl couldn’t catch quite enough air. There was a sickening, leaden thump that shook the entire vehicle.

   

“THE BIKES!” I shrieked. His Cannondale, my Schwinn, standing proudly in their racks on the roof of our car, had just been hit. I cringed as I pictured the bloody wreckage I was certain was above our heads.

   

“He hit,” my boyfriend, eyes glued to the rearview, pronounced, “the ground.”

   

I spun in my seat and craned my neck to look back but saw nothing. “Was he dead?”

   

“Not yet. He flopped once. There was a ton of feathers. We scared the crap out of the guy in the car behind us. He slammed on his brakes, but I think he might have run over it.”

   

“Stupid turkey!” I yelled, hitting the seat with a fist. “If he’d have stayed where he was, he’d be alright! Now he’s dead!” I was enraged at our participation in the process of natural selection. We were both vegetarians, and now we had killed ourselves a rather large bird.

   

“There was no way we could have stopped, was there?” I asked.

   

“I was going 80.”

   

“And the guy behind us would have hit us, right?”    

   

My boyfriend cast me a sideways glance. “Let’s stop and check the bikes.”

   

We pulled into, I think, a BP. I was shaking, and I sat in the car a moment longer than I had to while my boyfriend performed the investigation.

   

“It’s alright!” he called. “Come out, it’s alright!”

   

I expected blood, damage. I expected something. There was only a feather in the spokes of my bike.

  

Nancy – Group 2 (& Writing from the Heart Guru) – Tiny Murders

Tiny murders. Micro homicides. Stink pink was a game we played in the car on long road trips to the beach. Foolish girl horse: silly filly. Small puddle of pee: little piddle. Ancient mildew: old mold. Micro homicide would not have qualified, would have been nixed by Beulah the buzzer. It doesn’t rhyme my sister would sing-song from the back of the ‘51 Chevy with the hot wool seats. But points for high intelligence my father would lobby back.  

But tiny murders is not a game. It’s a clever catch phrase of a writing topic.  So: tiny murders.

Nixon lying to us about Cambodia. Nothing tiny about that one. George lying to us about weapons of mass destruction. Nothing tiny about that one either. Baby Jimmy Doe, brand new they don’t even know how many hours old found frozen in a mall parking lot. Too big to be tiny. Bill lying to us about a Blow Job. O Bill why didn’t you just say it was one of the best and it’s none of your business …. Now on to North Korea .Too stupid to be called tiny. My brother-in-law about his affair. Too painful to be called tiny. My crazy neighbor bringing my dead cat to my door in a green plastic garbage bag at 5:30 in the morning, the body still warm, saying someone must have hit your cat. Murder in the first degree, so forget tiny here.   

Steroids and athletes

cancer and nutra sweets

smog on the horizon

rates tripling from Verizon

pills for your mood Monsanto’s frankenfood

Hillary and her tears

Brittany Spears

Rehab for Paris and Amy and Lizzie

Shop til we drop as long as we’re busy

God forbid we should feel

The pain of the heart

Those are tiny murders and they’re just a start!  My father just turning fifty dying in front of me   one minute funny and brilliant and my hero and the next minute dead. Definitely not tiny. I was fifteen too young too much in awe of him and too not ready to go it alone in the big world.  It occurs to me that tiny and murders are oxymoronic, a little bit like saying small catastrophe.

And that wouldn’t qualify in stink pink either.So who came up with this dumb topic anyway?

Tiny Murders 

My favorite book to peruse at the independent bookstore in my neighborhood is The Book of Bunny Suicides by Andy Riley. The Book of Bunny Suicides features scenes of wee cartoon rabbits who, for no reason discernable to the reader,  “just don’t want to live anymore,” and do things like insert their pencil-doodled bodies into household toasters and float themselves into the paths of airplane propellers by tying helium balloons to their tails.

 

The book slays me every time (pardon the pun). Granted, it’s not something I’d actually purchase lest I be viewed as a twisted maniac by guests who find it on my coffee table, but it would make a hell of a gift. The hilariously ironic problem there, however, is that the only people I can think of who would appreciate the dark humor of The Book of Bunny Suicides have either seriously considered – or attempted – suicide themselves. It is one of those perfect tools that allows me to delineate quite clearly who is on my page (again, pun not intended) and who isn’t. 

 

So why my inordinate love for the Book of Bunny Suicides, and why are the people “on my page” the ones who dig twisted humor and have parts of their lives that are the bleakest and blackest and have left them  ……… so much like me??

 

My own suicide attempt isn’t on the books. I didn’t swallow pills or leave a note or tie anything to an appendage. My own self-murder involves more of a killing off of every past iteration of myself. I’ve mentally offed the 8-year-old who never enjoyed being a kid, the 19-year-old who spent every moment of her life drunk, the 22-year-old who decided that she was wise enough to choose the partner she’d have for the rest of her life. I’ve buried them all alive. Thrown them into the pot to boil down to insignificance, lest any of them bring to any wisdom bear on who I am now. Better to start fresh than carry around a difficult past.

 

However, the darkest version of me is the one I’m finding I enjoy the most – the only one I haven’t yet mentally slaughtered. She’s the one who enjoys witnessing the fictional, self-imposed demise of desperate – yet remarkably ingenious – cartoon bunnies. Who chuckles at the inanity of a teacher in Sudan who might be executed because of what she let one of her students name a stuffed animal, or the Jesus freaks who plan to protest Heath Ledger’s memorial service because he played a gay man in a movie once.

 

Life is absurd, this me is finding, and getting more so every day. Rather than letting it depress me like it almost always has, I’m learning to detach, observe, enjoy. This me can laugh at the 17-year-old that got caught naked under a blanket in her boyfriend’s basement by his parents, rather than cringe and flog herself in perpetuity.

 

So maybe I won’t want to murder this me in five years – or even five minutes. Unless it involves positioning my temple under the back leg of a chair in which an overweight man is about to settle. Now that’s just pure comedy.

Suzy - Group 2 - A Tiny Murder  

A man told me that if I walked into a bar and told this story I’d never have to buy another drink for the rest of my life. 

The emergency room for tiny murders, I get a free pass.  My father, in our name picking for giving presents picks my name, his one and only daughter.  Even the most cantankerous of father’s could figure out one present.  

We gather around the coffee table to open presents at my house. Each one has their turn opening a present. The presents are sweet, small and special.  

Now it is my turn, from Dad. He hands me the box and I know he ‘s been to CVS, Brooks or RiteAid. 

I can receive what ever this is in the spirit of love I tell myself. I can single hand my way through the roughest ocean of Christmas cheer as everyone waits to see my father’s one present effort. It is a prewrapped box. 

I feel the storm rise inside me as I reveal the yellow corner of death by Walt Whitman chocolates. I quickly grab onto the hope that I can smile and say “Thank you Dad for the thoughtful present.”  

The first wave of grief swamps me.  I sit very still in my chair.  My gathered family all does the jaw drop joke act. Like oh wow cool Dad knockyourselfout.   

I keep steering through this sea of cuts like a grown up girl.  He does not want to hurt me. He is just hopeless.  

But suddenly I fail grown up girl. I cannot bail fast enough. I start to sink.  I climb the stairs to my room just like when I was a little girl left to drown in her tears.

This tiny murder kills me for an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year but I continue to breath. I am strong and whole.  I am good.  I saved the box of Walt Whitman chocolates like one saves the murder weapon. I have proof when I slide onto the bar-stool for my free pass.